I am beyond thrilled to announce that I’ve finally reached the end of my second full-length Augment Saga novel, The Shadow of Arcadia, and it feels amazing! So mark your calendars! I’ve got something special for you all. I promised on my social media that I would do a cover reveal once the draft is done, and true to that promise, the cover art and blurb reveal for The Shadow of Arcadia will happen on FRIDAY 26 MAY - that’s 7 days from now. Keep watching my socials, as I’ll be posting a new graphic each day revealing just that little bit more of the cover. I’m very happy with the artwork I’ve produced for the book, and I hope you’ll join me in giving both it and the book the celebration they deserve.

In this longer blog post, I hope to take you through a journey of thinking about alternative applications for the speculative technologies in your sci-fi worldbuilding. There are already a lot of articles out there on the internet about the different types of faster-than-light (FTL) drive tech that have been used throughout science fiction. It’s a deep well you can draw from. There’s your warp drives, wormholes, hyperdrives, jump drives, even infinite improbability drives! And all of these have different flavours—such as the Federation’s dilithium-based matter/antimatter engine vs the Romulan singularity-based one… or others such as jump-gates, stargates, slipstream, and frame-shift drives—the list goes on and on.

From 1st to 3rd April, I’ll be partnering once again with Narratess for the #IndieApril mega sale, celebrating independent speculative fiction authors. You’ll be able to get yourself some lovely discounts on a huge range of books from indie sci-fi, fantasy and horror authors. And that’s kind of downplaying it. The sales in April and August were fantastic last year, but this year? Oh boy. 170+ books! So much bigger. It’s a great way to share the love for indie authors while also grabbing yourself some screaming deals. Find your next favourite author!

Progress on The Shadow of Arcadia is still slow. I’m finding this to be the hardest book I’ve yet written, but I am still making progress. It is now past novella-length, and past the length at which I extracted it from the original draft of From the Grave of the Gods, but there’s a lot still to add, and I’m just shy of half the way through. As I write Part Two of the novel, I have a very clear picture in my mind of where it’s heading, and there’s a sequence which I am absolutely dying to write.

The experience of selling signed copies of my books for the first time at craft fairs. At the end of October I bought a stall at the Fairkytes Arts & Crafts Market in Hornchurch. I’d never done anything of the sort before, though I had seen other crafty people in my family exhibit at them. It was certainly a learning experience, so I thought I’d share that with you. I became aware of the Fairkytes Arts & Crafts Market entirely by chance when a family member happened to mention they had seen it advertised on Facebook.

It’s 1st November, and that means it’s the turn of From the Grave of the Gods to have its book birthday! Two book birthdays in a year? Surely not! Now I’m just hogging all the celebrations. But it is true, From the Grave of the Gods, my first ever full-length novel made its way into the world one year ago today. It’s hard to believe. So much has happened since, and so many of you have welcomed my humble series starter with open arms, following along with Commander James Fowler’s remarkable journey. I’m honestly blown away by the reception.

Launch day has come at last! The third book in the Augment Saga is now available to purchase. I am pleased to announce that The Flight of the Aurora: An Augment Saga Novella is out now and available to buy in ebook format from Amazon for £1.99, and in paperback from all retailers for £6.99. It is also available to read for FREE on Kindle Unlimited! From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank all of you who have supported me in so many ways, whether that’s through pre-orders, reviews, sales, shares, likes, retweets or beta-reads. You’re all amazing, and I truly appreciate you…

Well, here’s a first for the blog: a review of a non-fiction book! I recently read the new expanded edition of Gareth L. Powell’s About Writing. As a writer myself, I’m keen to learn more about the craft and improve. One great way to do this is simply to write (this is, in fact, the most important way), another is to take advice from established writers. For new (and not so new) writers, there’s so much rich knowledge to be gleaned from those who have been immersed in the industry for a long time…

Here we go again, another impending book launch! I am pleased to announce that the third entry in The Augment Saga, The Flight of the Aurora: An Augment Saga Novella, will be releasing to the world on Tuesday 20th September 2022. It is a real honour that so many of you have read and enjoyed my books thus far, and it is my joy and privilege to present this novella to you: another step in the epic sci-fi adventure that’s been rattling around in my brain for decades.

Once again, I’ll be partnering with Narratess for another mega sale, this time for #IndieAugust, celebrating independent speculative fiction authors. August 6th and 7th, the ebook of From the Grave of the Gods will be discounted for the sale hosted by Tessa Hastjarjanto of Narratess.com. As in April, I'll be running a Kindle Countdown Deal for the US and UK marketplaces at 99p/99¢, and dropping the price in all other marketplaces as much as I can.

It’s hard to believe it’s already been a full year since the world was first introduced to Seventeen and the crew of the Qesh’kal, kicking off the epic story of The Augment Saga; a whole year since I became a published indie author! Since then it’s been a wild ride through many unknowns, with new experiences, new friends in the Writing Community, and facing new challenges; an emotional roller coaster of heartache, pride and joy, frustration and relief…

My next novella in the Augment Saga, The Flight of the Aurora, has returned from its beta reading phase and I am busy implementing the changes. I am immensely grateful to my beta readers for looking through my work and providing their invaluable feedback. Thankfully, there’s nothing major to adjust, so after another couple of editing passes, I’ll commence work on typesetting the thing - a process that ought to be easier this time around because I will be using my file for The Re-Emergence as a template.

From 18th - 22nd April, I’ll be partnering with Narratess for the first #indieapril mega sale, celebrating independent speculative fiction authors. April is the month we in the Writing Community celebrate independent authors, and there’s something extra special on the horizon this year. During the third week of the month, I and over 70 other indie authors will be taking part in an absolutely huge sale on speculative fiction books, hosted by Narratess.com.

What I really want is for this post to act as a sort of resource for other new writers who are thinking about self-publishing, particularly when it comes to IngramSpark and Amazon KDP. There’s a lot of stuff on the internet to help with self-publishing, and I’ve read a lot of it over the last two years as I’ve gradually brought my books to release, but there were still a few things that didn’t become clear to me until From the Grave of the Gods went live. So if this helps shed some light for new writers, that would be amazing. So, strap in because this will be a long one.

IT IS DONE! I have finally finished the first significant draft of The Flight of the Aurora, the next entry in the Augment Saga. Hooray! This book takes place fifteen years after the events of From the Grave of the Gods, and continues to follow James and Angela on another adventure. This one is meant to bridge what will be a significant time gap between the first and second full-length novels…

The time has finally come. The Great and Terrible day of Alan K. Dell is upon us. One thousand humans (presumably) have pledged their allegiance - nay, their very souls - to me, in support of my evil schemes. Muhuahahahaaaa! Lol it’s not all that dramatic. But I am so incredibly grateful to all those who have hit that follow button on Twitter to see more of my nonsense on their timelines. I can’t quite believe it: 1000 followers…

It’s been a little while since I shared a writing update on the blog, so I thought, as it’s New Year, it was time to let you all know what I’ve been doing since the release of From the Grave of the Gods. Well, first of all, after I picked myself up off the floor from the absolutely incredible launch of my first novel (which is now sitting at well over 60 sales), I continued working on my next novella, The Flight of the Aurora. If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you’ll know that in response to some very valuable beta reader feedback, I had to cut my draft of From the Grave of the Gods into two novels. The first of which became the one I took to publication in November this year.

Launch week for From the Grave of the Gods was incredible. The outpouring of love and support from so many places has been overwhelming in the best possible way. I’ve posted sporadic live reactions to various updates surrounding the launch of the book on my social media channels throughout that week. So I thought I’d gather things together here on the blog and take you through what happened since day one, noting a few observations about the experience and things I wasn’t expecting.

Launch day! From the Grave of the Gods, the first novel in the Augment Saga is out now. Wow, what an amazing journey this has been. I can’t believe it’s been just over two years since I started writing the book that would become From the Grave of the Gods. From that tentative start faffing around in an excel spreadsheet making a vague timeline one evening while on holiday in August 2019…

For those of you have been following my social media for some time, you’ll already likely be aware of this news, but I have been given the marvelous opportunity to be involved in the Havering Literary Festival this year! I’m so excited to be able to both share about my work with readers and support my local libraries.